My students love Harry Potter. Just recently, a sophomore asked (out of the blue) about how the time-turner plot in the third book of the series could possibly work out. With absolutely no hesitation, one student started to explain how it worked, while another quickly pulled out her iPod so she could play the relevant passage from the audiobook (which itself led to an immediate conversation with yet another student about the talents of its narrator: Jim Dale).
I was once commenting to another youth pastor about their deep affection for the Boy Who Lived, and I kinda of expected him to have similar stories. He did not. In fact, he was sort of surprised at just how much they loved Harry Potter.
It turns out, not every youth group is filled with members of Dumbledore’s Army.
I am thinking more about more about how to equip and support youth ministry at other churches, as I’ve started to do more work at the diocesan level for youth ministry. And my list of resources I want give to other churches is getting smaller and smaller. Because it is increasingly clear to me that there are fewer and fewer things about my youth ministry that can transfer over to other churches. Not because my church is somehow an oddity – but that every church is an oddity.
The primary goal of youth ministry is to disciple “youth” – whatever age bracket you consider to be in that category. I’m in charge of ministry to 6th-12th graders. A time in which humans are radically changing who they are. In transitioning from childhood to adulthood, adolescents are developing their identity (who they are), affinity (who they belong to), and autonomy (how they are able to affect the world around them). Youth ministry is a messy and unpredictable project of working with moving targets. Adolescents are people in the midst of reunderstanding who they are and discovering who they are becoming, and in the midst of that hurricane I am trying to encourage them to do see Jesus as a central point of reference. It is chaotic.
Every individual adolescent is not only unique, but going through this transition in a unique way. Given the utter variety and unpredictability of adolescence, it would be insane to expect to do my job without immense flexibility and adaptability.
It’s why the resources I am trying to provide for other churches are almost never ready-to-teach curriculum. Even the way I teach my students has to be some mixture of my skills and their personalities. And the recipe changes: Next year I’ll have a small turnover, a little more the year after that, and in 7 years my youth group will be completely different people – who will require a completely different interaction.
Sure, there are things that are common to American teenagers. And I’ll bet that the uniqueness of any given group gets flattened out as your group gets larger and better represents “average”. But given that 59% of American churches have fewer than 100 weekly attenders (meaning probably 10 or fewer adolescents), the most people doing youth ministry have a lot of room to minister to people, not demographics.
And that’s the key: people, not demographics. This probably applies to all types of ministry – as well as any job that deals with people. When you are in the people business, you have to be in the person business. Individual persons. And when those individual persons are in transition – you (and I) had better put in the hard work of creatively coming alongside them in the process. Because each individual is in a different place this year than they were last year.
I think this year I’ve been caught ministering to a bunch of students who already graduated a few years ago. It’s time to do some creative contextualization – getting to know a lot of individuals and learning their stories, learning how to come alongside them as they do the hard work of becoming who they are going to be. And if you are in a field anything like mine – it’s time to do that hard work. Think of how to serve people, not statistical averages.
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